i’ll start with some context as per usual. so one night i was on ebay just searching for broken wii u systems cause i thought it’d be fun to fix another one. i find a pair of broken systems for ~£33 and as i explained in the previous post the seller claimed that one had error 160-0103 and the other they had no clue. so i decide to buy them.
fast forward to the following monday, they’re here. and in quite bad condition too. not dirty or dusty thankfully, just a load of scratches which i suppose isn’t unusual for a wii u now that i’m thinking about it. i then take them upstairs and plug one of them in. it’s the error 160 one! using udpih to boot the unofficial wii u recovery menu shown me that it was on firmware version 5.5.2 (e). i then use said recovery menu to dump the system’s error logs and have a look through them. media error. hynix. unsurprising. now that i know what’s going on though, i download MLCRestorerDownloader and use it to download the MLC titles (which for the most part is all the software on the wii u that you as a user interact with) onto the sd card. i then use udpih to launch into the isfshax installer and install it to the system. now that’s on there i use the minute menu to wipe the system’s MLC and scfm.img (which i now kinda regret not doing after i had dumped the MLC but oh well). then the new MLC titles go on there and the problem seems to be fixed. for now. a kinda funny side effect of doing it this way is that the system’s MLC has effectively been updated while its SLC is still on 5.5.2, meaning it’s using 5.5.2’s iosu to boot the 5.5.5 MLC titles. doing this doesn’t seem to cause any issues at all and it’s easy enough to just update the system now that i’m in but despite that it still made me laugh a little when i first saw it. a less funny side effect of doing this is that because i’m not using a rednand this error could come back at any point due to me having just reinstalled the MLC titles onto a failing MLC. that won’t be an issue though now that isfshax is on the system because i can just use that to either drag the MLC through the pits of hell one last time or make a rednand.
now this second one’s a bit of a funny one. i connect it up to my switch to run udpih and boot it. it does fail to display anything so i download the dc_init variant of the recovery menu and try it. it works. i then install isfshax and boot with nothing but the plugins required to boot now that it has isfshax installed. it’s perfectly fine. no issues whatsoever. i have no clue either. all i know is that it’s actually my main wii u system now, turns out this one doesn’t have a hynix nand. it’s a toshiba! as far as i’m aware toshibas seem to be the most reliable of the three MLC manufacturers. unfortunately i can’t move my NNIDs over to this new system as that requires you contact nintendo’s support and ask them to unlink the NNIDs and looking through their support pages i can’t tell if they offer this service anymore. but that’s not much an issue when you can make backups of your digital games i suppose.
man i love homebrew.